DVD of the Week: The Social Network

The two-disk DVD release of “The Social Network,” which I discuss in the clip above, features a making-of documentary by David Prior that offers some revealing looks behind the scenes—most interestingly, footage from the three weeks of rehearsals that preceded the shoot. Sitting around a table, the director, David Fincher, and the screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, freely discuss the ideas and motives that they find in a variety of scenes and moments—and reveal their fruitful creative differences.

The phrase “I’m C.E.O., bitch”—a line that the character Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake, whose shift into character at the table is wondrous to behold) feeds Mark Zuckerberg—prompts Fincher to explain that, as it would be used in the film, it would evoke sympathy for an inventor who is being pushed out of the company he founded by his corporate investors. But Sorkin says he’d be more inclined to sympathize with a character who had been rejected by a woman.

Similarly, Sorkin asserts that Zuckerberg, as written, feels betrayed by his friend Eduardo Saverin’s impending membership in a final club; Fincher says that, for Zuckerberg. “the unspoken crime has to do with the inequity of the universe” and, in particular, with the fact that, having gotten into Harvard on his intellectual merit, he’s now being judged on his ability to “tie a full Windsor.” In other words, he’s not resentful of Eduardo’s social success but of the overall social whirl, and world, that seem to have changed the rules on him mid-race and for which he is unprepared.

The split between their points of view—which seemed evident when I saw the film at a press screening last September—is brought to light. Sorkin constructed a terrific script, but Fincher transformed it, not just visually, but thematically; he rescued it from pettiness and turned it into a portrait of greatness, in which even the resentments that fuel Zuckerberg have a certain artistic grandeur. Here’s how Fincher explains Zuckerberg’s and Parker’s affinity:

Their connection is sort of as anarchists…. The greatest act of anarchy is not to be the guy outside the walls throwing fucking Molotov cocktails or spray-painting outside the palace walls. The ultimate act of anarchy is, you’re in the fucking king’s suite, you’re in the fucking pope’s quarters with the fucking spray paint, with a can of Krylon.

Sounds like his description of what it feels like to make a big, brash, and personal film within a Hollywood studio. It’s easy to see why the movie—which thoroughly deserves the Oscar for Best Picture—might lose out to the sedate pieties of “The King’s Speech.”

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